The Beach Boys? "A religious experience!" Woodstock?
"I was tripping my brains out!" Self-destruction? "Great fun!"
So says Aerosmith's Steven TyIer, a man proudly suffering from "Lead Singer Disorder"!

HEY! WHAT'S WITH THE BODYLANGUAGE!" yawlps Steven Tyler. "Aren't you pleased to see me? Don't you like what you see?"
Aerosmith's lizard-like frontman is stripped to the waist, sporting little more than circulation-threatening tailored jeans and a pair of gold pixie boots , and is in mid-shoot as MOJO arrives at a London photographic studio. Rather than interrupt the photo session, your correspondent slinks to one side and stands
there, arms folded, and is castigated for such defensive posturing.
The barechested Tyler, freshly bronzed from a two-week "shorts and a thong" sojourn in Hawaii, saunte rs over, extends a vociferous greeting and begins a conversational avalanche that sweeps through MOJO's last Dylan cover to the tragic loss of James Brown and on to th etime he met Thom Yorke in a clothing
store, Then he pauses ...
"Aha! I've got something you haven't got !"
he sing-songs with playground-like glee, pointing at a huge leather-bound tome that sits on his dr essing table . Embossed with the word STU , the book is a limited edition tribute to lan Stewart, The Rolling Stones' keyboard player, road manager and all-round "sixth member", and features th e big man's candid photography.Over the years the Stones have cast a long shadow over Tyler and his band, with Aerosmith enduring endless unjust and unfavour able critical comparison s to Dartford's most famous son s, a point due in part to their singer's lippy resemblance to MickJagger. While this has rankled with Tyler in the past, today is different. "Mick Jagger is still God to me! " he enthuses, and, in a split second, the yappy 58-year- old father of four is off onto another one of his heroes.
"I wore one of John Lennon's jackets at the Hard Rock last nightl Can you believe that?!" he gushes with excitement.
Tyler is in town to announce Aerosmith's appearance at the Hard Rock Cafe-sponsored Hyde Park Calling festival on June 24.
Tomorrow night, the five-piece of Tyler, sparring partner/guitarist Joe Perry, along with guitarist Brad Whitfield, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer (the latter triumvirate selfdeprecatingly dubbing themselves as "the less interesting three") will play an invite-only show at th e celebratcd eatery. The set will showcase their formative influences via Rufus Thornas's Walking The Dog and their take on The Yardbirds' Train Kept A-Rollin' , their '70s heyday (Sweet Emotion, Walk This Way, Draw The Line) and more recent MTV-friendly hits I Don't Want To Miss A Thing, Cryin' and Livin' On The Edge, summing up
Aerosmith 's remarkable 37-year journey. It is that journey - from rags to riches via Olympian feats of self-abuse and destruction, and on to glory again - that we are her e to discuss in more personal terms. As we repair to a candlelit suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Steven Tyler invites us on what will soon become an emotional rollercoaster, We start on relatively safe ground by discussing Aerosmith's most famous track.. .

Walk This Way - a song you once described as "a fantasy about older girls getting in your pants" - has just been covered by Sugababes and Girls Aloud in the UK. lt's a strange choice, wouldn't you sayl

Ha! Yeah. lt's interesting that they've veered from the lyrics again. Even Run-D.M.C.did that. They couldn't work them out. But I suppose a lot of my Iyriesare train of thought and, as I used to like to say, my train stopped at every station! Actually, to be honest, unfortunately it didn't! (laughs) It only stopped at one station called WII-FM - whieh stands for What's In It For
Me!Omigod! Did I really just say? (laughs) Anyway, WII-FM was genuinely a sexual thing for me, that's what I wrote about...
"Backstroke lover (makes hand appropriate gesture)/Always hidin' 'neath the covers /Til I talked to your daddy, he say /He said , 'You ain't seen nothin' 'til you're down on a muflinl  Then you're sure to be a-changin' your ways/I met a
cheerleader, was areal young bleeder... "
obviously the girls couldn't sing that so they changed it around a bit. Joe and I wrote it when we were on tour soundchecking in Hawaii at the HIC, which I think is still there. I used to be a drummer and Joe was playing the riffand I
came up with the rhythm. The word s came later . lt's proved over the years that you can't keep a good song down! I'm not going to criticise the new version because lt's for Comie Relief. At the end of the day, that's what counts.

Of course, But sex has always inspired your lyrical vocabulary. At one point weren't you worried about being a sex addict?

I wasn 't worried about it. I got coined that, Look, I had nine years sobriety and I was siek and fucking tired of arguing with the band all the time. How many bands [from our generation] are still around? Does zero ring a bell? Do you know why? Because they either say, "Fuck you!" or they fight. lt's like The Kinks when Dave punched Ray. l've given Joe the finger more tirnes than I can remember. But lt's about dialogue now. lt's even like that with governments now. Even if Idi Amin chopped a million babies' heads off, you 've got to go over and talk to him now. Keep fucking dialogue open, that's the way it ls.
So the band [and I] were always fighting and I couldn't find out why. Turns out, the fuckers are just jealous! You know, I go out into the street and everyone comes over and asks me for my autograph, but they don't go over to Tom [Hamilton]. And his wife hates me, and so forth . What the fuck up 's with that? It's not my fault! I've got Lead Singer Disorder - LSD as Jimmy Page puts it! So I went away to find out how Icould attract the flies with more honey than vinegar. I swear to fuck, I went to a place calied Sierra Tucson for a month. There was a wonderful guy there who was my mentor and I was reading a lot of Maya Angelou and getting back into the spiritual world because, to be honest with you, heroin and drugs, the reason I got off them is because I'm a lyricist and the fucking shit steals from you. It takes away your memory and you can 't remember anything, rhyme scheme or have fun any more . You become a mere shell of yourself. So, anyway, I went away to this place . While I was there they started asking me things like, "What are you all about?" And I said, ''What  do you mean?" And they said, "Were you there when a key member of your family passed away?" And I said, "I was on the road when my grandma passed." And they went, "Grief group!" So they said, "Have you ever had sex on the road ?" I was like, "Duh!" So they went, "Sex addict!" "Have you ever done drugs on the road?" "Drug addict! " By the time l left that room an hour later I had six new monikers grief addict, sex addict, drug addict and the rest ! I was like, "What?" I mean what fucking rock star hasn't had an affair or been with three girls? What heterosexual normal man hasn 't dreamed of being with three girls at once? And the one who says he hasn't, well he's a lying motherfucker! And you know it! I mean, what woman hasn't had a fantasy of being with two men? It doesn't take a 58-year-old man on tape to say those words, it's just the way life is. Anyhow, I got a lot of other things out of that place that were interesting, but those things weren't part of that."

So from what you've said I take it there's a spiritual side to you. Does It get lost behind the stereotype of the "sex guy"?

Well, there's always going to be somebody that's go ing to think that Steven Tyler is the, (shrieks) "What-da-da-da-da!" or that crazy guy that you see on-stage, but if you listen to a song I wrote in 1969, Dream On, you might get a different view. I don't even know where I came up with that shit! (semi-sings) "Eve ry time that I look in the mirror/All these lines on my face getting dearer/The past is gone/lt went by like dusk to dawn/Isn't that the way/Everybody's got their dues in life to pay," I was just a teenager when I wrote that, smoking as much pot as everyone else at the time. I went to church, I had a sister, l'm Italian and l've probably seen the sun set and rise as much as you have.. . But let me tell you, I like cutting the umbilical cord at my son Taj's birth when my ex-wife gave birth. l like smelling placenta. l like the act of making love rather than saying, "I fucked youl" I was in Hawaii for two weeks recently and (saidalmestincredulously) I watched the sun rise and the sun set! So if anybody wants to see the spiritual side of Steven Tyler weil, yes, it's fucking there! They can just listen to my lyrics.

Let's go back to the beginning. Your father Victor Tallarico led a society band and taught music. What did you learn from him while you were growing up?

I learnt that you could and should practise every day. We lived in a small apartment at 5610 Neverland Avenue in the Bronx. lf you ever read the comic books Archie, that's where he lived.We lived on the sixth floor in an apartment. l've been back there since and it isn't very big but in the corner there was a
grand piano . A Steinway grand! It was an apartrnent in the Bronx. He practised every day - Beethoven, Bach, Chopin. He went to Juilliard. So l listened to him, I listened to the classics (sings a classical air, and then scales). That was drummed into my head. lf you watch early films of Aerosmith from about 71 or 72 I was forever tuning Joe, Tom and Brad's guitars because they couldn't but I had the ear and that was a gift. It came from God first, of course, and then from my father.

You started singing at the age of three and performing at Trow-Rico, a
holiday lodge your family owned, didn'tyou?

Well, my grandfather came over from Italy,from Calabria, and lived in the
Bronx. Allthe brothers got together - it was a family thing - they got about five
grand together, bought a place in Sunapee, New Hampshire and opened
a small [camp] of housekeeping cottages. Everysummer of my life I Iived up there. MyAunt Phyllis, the wife of my father's brother Ernie,would encourage me to perform . All the families that came up had kids and every Friday night she'd
get everyone together and we would sing John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. She would put together Iittle skits in the barn downstairs where she had a little stage. There was just a curtain and a few chairs in front of it. So I started there. That was the beginning of it. Then came The Beatles, The Kinks, The
Hullabaloos and all that stuff. Watching them as Igrew up, I realised that I could sing. The next thing was that I wanted to write a song. I could do that too so it all went from there.

So you grew up around classical music, and then you heard rock'n'roll. What did it do to you when you first heard it?

What did it do to me? (pauses) God... Before I had sex, it was sex! When I heard The Everly Brothers do (sings) "I wonder if Icare as much" and those double harmonies... wow! I started off listening to them and then at nine or 10 I got a little AM-radio and put a wire up in the apple tree to get WOWO Fort Wayne Indiana [the dominant EasyCoast station of the '50s]. But listening to music done like that with that freedom and the harmonies, the fifths... I think that in the year 2100 teaching children will be like that. Right now lt's Iike "One-and-one-ls-two." That's ridiculous. Take a c1ass room of kids - 20 kids and
teach them the names of the planets. How? I'll tell you. (Sings) "Mercury,Venus, the Earth and Mars/These are the planets that dwell in the stars/Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus too/Mercury, Venus I know them to you," They have a laugh and they sing. That's how the brain works. That's what music can do. lt can teach you.

Since you're talking about education, you were busted at High School by an undercover narcotics officer and expelled in 1966.
That must have scarred you ...

(Laughsl Weil, that's just the way it was. l'm 58 so when I went to school it was 1963, '64, '65, '66. I started coming alive at the age of 14, 15, 16. I was noticing other people. It was just something that happened - marijuana and the [Vietnam] war. The war was terrible, but peace was put together with smoking pot (flashes peacesign). lt's something that we don't have today. lt's all fucking ecstasy in clubs a.nd, er, fucking. Back then you were 13, you passed the joint and it was "Make Love, Not War". Everybody was your friend. [Today] I could see people in the street and not know if they were going to mug you or not. Back then, you looked at somebody (makes smoking gesture)and you'd go and smoke a joint with them. You started talking. lt was sweet and beautiful. The narc in school was just a thing that happened. We were go ing to the Canopy Music, watching the English Invasion and taking acid and shit. But,
yeah, it was a bust, but actually it got me a YO- which stands for Youthful
Offender. That kept me out of the war, so I could have been dead and I
wouldn't have been sitting here."

Good of you to look on the bright side. You joined your first bands in 1963, started playing and got your first glimpse into the proper world of rock'n'roll when you opened for such as The Beach Boys and The Lovin' Spoonful. What did it mean to you?

(Pauses, looks down and his eyes weil up) You're gonna make me cry. It was fucking everything to me.... I used to sit at home and listen to those bands, bands IikeThe Beach Boys. I don't know how to say it any other way and I don't want to get heavy on you, but life was explained to me through song and music. When I was even younger - like six or seven - I went to church, we sang hymns and there was a table with candles on it. I thought God lived under that table. I thought that through the power of song, God was there. It was that energy was always in song. So when I would listen to those bands and then I got a chanceto play with them (looks incredulous and falls silent again) ... God,The Beach Boys... When The Beach Boys played lona College, this was a college of 6,000 kids that were all singing along with every word. This was before The Beatles! I had not seen them at the Shea Stadium by that point. I had not had a religious experience that big until that point. All of us singing together, (bursts into song)"I wish they all could be California Girls!" Omigod! And we opened up for them!? And The Byrds.... Ahh....

So that would have been in March '66 when you were in The Strangeurs. You also did a TV show with The Shangri-Las a few months later.

(lnterrupting) Well, The Shangri-Las was the earliest 'on' that I really recall. That lead singer girl, Mary Weiss... I was in the bathroom before the show. I thought my drummer was in the stall next to me but he wasn't. I looked over and that girl was in there peeing! I tell that story because ...

vollständiges Interview hier (pdf, 6,9MB)

Karten für das große AEROSMITH - open air auf dem Hessentag gibt es bei der Butzbacher Stadtkultur und hier.

Interview by PHIL ALEXANDER • Portrait by ROSS HALFIN (Quelle: Mojo Magazin)